Rowan Collins (rowan.collins(a)gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:
Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point:
content imported
under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be
creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if
not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer.
But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to
mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully
a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that.
Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a
rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added
this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this
would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of
encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to
be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in
their "history flow" system...
As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line,
not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this
worth experimenting with for the back end.
- d.